The other day, I accidentally put my boss’ name and a phone-sex phone number on one of our Web sites at work.

This isn’t one of those passive-agressive things, like Oops! I “accidentally” watered all my annoying roomate’s houseplants with beer — this was an honest, if exceedingly unfortunate, mistake.

The Web site read: “For questions, contact [my boss] at 1-800-[number very similar to our 800 number]“.

If you happened to have questions last week, you called and a recording of a woman answered: “For some stim-u-lating conversation, call 1-900-[some sex line].”

My boss is a woman. Like the woman on the recording. Well, most likely nothing like the woman on the recording, but you, a customer with questions, wouldn’t know that. You could easily be confused. And much more confused after the phone call.

God forbid some dunder-headed somebody took the next step, oblivious, and called the 900 number, and will soon sue us for phone-bill damages. “But I had questions! It said to call 1-900 . . .”

The wrong number was up terrifyingly for about four days. That’s a whole nother story, about how our IT department is in New York while we’re in Minneapolis, and about how you have to send painstakingly detailed e-mails explaining changes to the Web site. Rest assured I asked, requested, encouraged, and demanded them to change the number every ten minutes or so.

Luckily my boss is super cool and understanding. Even if she’s not reading this right now: still cool! She actually found it funny. Funny and disturbing. We’d called the number a couple of times: we’d call, and she’d laugh heartily, and then I’d laugh a little, and then she’d stop laughing and say: “This has got to change.”

“Definitely,” I said, nodding vigorously. Then we’d listen to the recording and laugh again, etc.

I sure didn’t add this to my Netflix queue for its plot. Here’s the synopsis: “While she spends her days filing papers as a harried office temp, Myra returns home each evening to an even more chaotic world, where her eccentric younger brother, Ludlow, staves off manic episodes through his art. But when Myra opens her heart to a shy but endearing co-worker, her love for her brother finds a rival…and Ludlow fights back for her affection.” Meaningless jobs? Shy people with problems? Mental illness? Bonding against all odds? Stinks of Eau d’Generic Indie to me.

No, what drew me in was Alicia Goranson, better known as Roseanne’s Original Becky. I hadn’t seen her in anything since Boys Don’t Cry, so I thought she might have sacked acting for, I don’t know, data entry. My Netflix search turned this up, I popped it in, and surprise! She’s pretty good. As Myra, she’s able to be tough, tender, angry, sad, happy, and hopeful, often in the same scene. (Watch for the moment just after she argues Shy but Endearing Co-Worker out of her apartment.) She also has a pleasant, goofball screen presence that isn’t too polished to allow real emotion (see: Streep). I do have a hard time not hearing Becky when Goranson opens her mouth, but she pulls off a credible Brooklyn (?) accent and maintains it during her variety of moods. It’s always nice to see an old TV friend doing well for herself. Her cast bio says she’s spent a lot of time in theater; I hope that’s not because no one wants to cast her in movies, because if Jennifer Aniston gets to have a career, there’s no reason Goranson shouldn’t.

This is obviously a woman who sucks….

Woman Arrested For Hamster Neglect

Police arrested a woman for neglecting hamsters at her home after her roommate called authorities, police said Sunday.

 

Sgt. Rick Larson said police arrested the 23-year-old on 39 counts each of two charges: failing to provide food and drink and failing to provide proper shelter to animals.

 

The Rock County Humane Society removed 33 live and six dead hamsters.

My first thought was that maybe she was trying to get back at the Hamsters of Doom. I mean maybe she was trying to torture these hamsters because she was afraid of what they might do to her if left roaming around outside of cages. In her mind they would obviously be raining down terror on the innocent with coconuts. Her solution: round up as many hamsters as possible and submit them to death by starvation. Striking fear into the hearts of all would be Hamsters of Doom! (I think a better solution would be to submit the would be coconut-dropping flying hamsters to waterboarding torture. But maybe that’s just me… and perhaps the Khymer Rouge, or Donald Rumsfeld. In good company.)

But then I started thinking… Maybe she was just well on her way to being that hamster lady (instead of a cat lady). Or was she really a future cat lady prepping up to get her first cats, thinking that it would be better to start off small, with hamsters. She obviously isn’t going to make much of a cat lady at this rate. Perhaps she should’ve started off with a plant. But maybe she did start off with a plant, like one of those plants that you only have to water once every week or two. Maybe I don’t know what’s going on.

If she just watched the Hamster Dance maybe she wouldn’t have felt the need to have 40 hamsters in her home. Maybe we should all watch the hamster dance a little bit more often. All that good energy. All that love. All that DANCING! Maybe that would cancel out the Doom Hamsters. You know, like in Ghostbusters 2 where the Ghostbusters sprayed all that good slime on the inside of the Statue of Liberty and rigged it up with a Nintendo controller and came into the city and everybody in New York started singing “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” and all that good energy started flowing and Vigo ends up being destroyed? Yeah. Good energy. Hamster Dance. Sweet.

When Mel Gibson went on his anti-semitic-with-a-dash-of-sexist rant about two months ago, there was really nothing interesting to be said. There was plenty of material there for legitimate indignation and topical humor, neither of which I thought would be particularly blog-worthy at the time.

This morning’s news about Florida Congressman Mark Foley checking himself into rehab for treatment of alchoholism reminded me what about the Mel Gibson incident had been so particularly distasteful. In case you haven’t paid attention to the media recently, (Republican– not that it matters) Mark Foley resigned after being accused of sexual harassment of minors through internet messaging. This is made even more awful when one learns that he was on the House caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. (There’s a running coverage on abcnews.com which credits itself with forcing Foley’s resignation. There’s a lot of sensationalist material there, the character of which is definitely worthy of its own analysis.)

What reminds me of Mel Gibson about Foley’s recent interest in rehab is the way both public figures found a way to attach their despicable acts– some might even characterize them as unforgiveable– to a “forigiveable” disease. In a rhetorical move worthy of almost-awe, Mel Gibson’s apology to the Jewish community not only trumped up the importance of humility, thereby attempting to resituate Gibson as a “true” Christian, but also drew subtle parallels between anti-Semitism to alchoholism.

The rationale, I imagine, was that if we can understand alchoholism as a disease, then surely anti-semitism could be one too? One perhaps even caused by the former? Now Foley is seeking help for his problem with drinking, which suggests to us that his sexual exploitation of his pages is somehow a result of his disease. Moves by both these figures is an expert way to side-step moral culpability (not to mention potentially diminish legal consequence), and I’m horrified by both.

Because if your main joke is injuring your characters, then those characters had better deserve it.  And although Wayans & Co. score some points by having Dr. Phil amputate his own foot, the other actors are so boring that I can’t even muster the energy to hate them.

Last week, Bill Clinton went on Fox News for an interview with Chris Wallace. Wallace accused him, basically, of causing 9/11 through his inaction (a la ABC’s mockumentary, “Path to 9/11″). Clinton reacted, to say the least. Watch the pretty sparks fly (via ThinkProgress).

Clinton’s rebuttal reminded me of an essay in the New Yorker from a couple of weeks ago where Clinton suggested the Democratic Party fight back when criticized — he said the Kerry campaign’s mistake in 2004 was that it ended up “like a deer caught in the headlights”. That when the Swift Boat smear campaign started, Kerry should have challenged Bush and Cheney to a town-hall debate on their Vietnam records. Clinton said:

Bush and Cheney were like me—they didn’t go. But Kerry was a genuine war hero!

Hillary, like Bill, doesn’t sit still for criticism. This might not be enough to make her electable, and it certainly doesn’t make her any less moderate, but it’s something, right?

Since Clinton’s eruption on Fox, other Dem mouthpieces, like Paul Begala and James carville, have already given it a try. Yelling back at Bill O’Reilley and what-not. But until November the only clear winner is Fox News, with a ratings-boost last week.

What does more good — criticizing Fox News on Fox News, which (surprisingly) has a 20% Democrat and 17% independent viewership? Or making fun of Bill O’Reilley on the Colbert Report, which has a 110% liberal commie viewership?